Re: What do mistakes reveal about human nature?

Description: Interesting things happen when two sides of the brain duke it out.

Question: What do mistakes reveal about human nature?

Transcript: Well mistakes almost always reveal something interesting about the system that makes them. When I was a kid I was fascinated by optical illusions. I would sit in my father’s study – I had this book of optical illusions – and just stare and state at the lines that you could just put your fingers down and you’d realize they’re equal lengths; but you took your fingers up and, “My gosh! They look like one’s longer than the other!” How does that happen? How can I believe something that at one level I know is absolutely wrong? I think this is a metaphor for a lot of what’s interesting in psychology. Our tendency to believe, but to not believe. One part of our brain says it’s right. Another part of our brain says it’s wrong. Mistakes that we make almost always reveal the war between these two parts of our brain. The war between what’s rational and what’s irrational inside our heads.

Question: What are humankind’s most interesting mistakes?

Transcript: Well I . . . you know, when we think of historical mistakes, we certainly don’t think of interesting ones. The Holocaust was a mistake, and we don’t think of that as interesting and revealing something exciting about human nature. When you ask about the ways in which mistakes are interesting, I think of the mistakes that all of us make in everyday life. When we buy the wrong thing at the grocery store. Or when the train tracks appear to be converging on the horizon when they really aren’t. Or when we think we heard our mother calling when it was really someone else. These little mistakes of perception, of memory, of imagination are very exciting to psychologists because they reveal something about the structure of the human mind. But I wouldn’t want to say that historical mistakes are interesting in the same way.

Question: What will we never learn?

Transcript: (Laughter) Well I guess by definition that’s a question no one can answer, right? I’m not sure we will ever really understand the nature of experience. That is, we will . . . I’m not sure we will ever be able to answer the philosopher’s question, “Why does it feel like something to be us, rather than feeling like nothing?”

Recorded on: 6/12/07